In what circumstances might you expect a violent mob to congregate outside your home, hurling bricks at your windows and attacking police officers trying to protect you? What might you have done to merit the mob’s attempts to break into your home? Who would you need to be sheltering? What hideous crimes would need to have occurred?

And whatever your answers to these questions, however “deserving” you were or were not of the attention, how frightened would you be by the sound of glass smashing and door handles being rattled by members of the howling mob?

Exactly these scenes unfolded on three nights last week in the Norfolk town of Thetford. All that was known about the humans being terrorised is that they were “believed to be asylum seekers“. In the UK today, that is enough. That is all you need to have “done”.

Some asylum seekers have committed terrible crimes. So, of course, have some police officers, doctors, Capricorns, nurses and long-distance lorry drivers. So have newspaper columnists, comedians, TV presenters and radio hosts. So, almost certainly, has someone who lives where you live, or does what you do, or eats what you eat. But don’t worry. You will never be held accountable for their crimes or be forced to hide terrified in the darkness while complete strangers bay for your blood. Unless you’re an asylum seeker. Right?

Wrong. As we saw during the race riots in Belfast in June it’s even worse than that. Spawned by online footage of a black man, later revealed to be a Sudanese national, attacking a white man with a knife, the mobs on the march there quickly targeted the homes of Romanians. In the east of the city, families from Ukraine and Poland. In Sandy Row, in central Belfast, a Syrian supermarket was targeted by arsonists, while a few miles west, on Crumlin Road, Ugandan health workers and Nigerian families were shepherded to safety by volunteers.

There are obvious, and complicated, differences between Thetford and Belfast. But there is at least one similarity behind these two events that merits closer examination and, unless a different course is adopted by politicians of all persuasions, suggests that darker days may lie ahead.

Namely, the involvement of the world’s richest man. “As the owner of X and its most followed user, [Elon] Musk has unparalleled power to shape what people see online,” said Imran Ahmed, the founder and chief executive of the non-profit tech watchdog, Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), in June. “Yet our research shows that he used the Belfast tragedy to amplify anti-migrant narratives to millions of users, prompting endless calls for violence.”

He not only amplified calls for “protest” from Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the far-right activist who prefers to be known as Tommy Robinson, but also turbo-charged anti-immigration posts and messages from Rupert Lowe, leader of Restore Britain, allowing the politician currently appealing to voters who find Nigel Farage too compassionate and tolerant to reach millions of eyes. CCDH researchers found that the unsavoury threesome’s posts about Belfast secured over 115 million views. It was the responses to these posts that contained what CCDH called “an explosion in calls for violence”, with almost 4,000 calling for lynchings and other crimes.

In Thetford, Yaxley-Lennon used Musk’s platform to share footage from the pogroms. In one clip, a man is directing the mob to a specific address where, he says, “invaders” will be found. A grim modus operandi, in other words, has been established by the far right and boosted beyond their wildest dreams by Elon Musk. It is now primed and ready to go not only whenever a person of colour commits a violent crime but also, as we saw last week, when some people who might be asylum seekers might have moved into what might be their temporary home.

One point I fear everybody is missing – including the Home Office, whose response to Thetford was mealy-mouthed and inadequate – is that this normalisation of violence cannot be controlled by the men who have perpetrated it. An unstable, unhinged or simply unpleasant person does not need to be from the far right to contemplate violence. Such a person simply needs to live in a society where calls for it have become commonplace and examples of it frequent.

And if this person’s political foes are stoking it or – as Nigel Farage did at PMQs after the Southampton violence, decline to condemn it when repeatedly challenged – then how hard is it to imagine this person deciding to adopt similar tactics? The politicians may, in other words, potentially be turning up the heat on themselves. Perhaps this possibility of exposing themselves to danger will help them think twice about blithely directing it at others.

Happily, this danger is easily assuaged. Politicians of every persuasion need to make it abundantly and absolutely clear that scenes like the ones in Thetford last week or Belfast in June or Southampton that same month are utterly unacceptable. You do not discuss them through the lens of other people’s “peaceful protests” and you do not caveat your condemnations with talk of supposedly “legitimate concerns”.

But most obviously, and most urgently, you do not let Elon Musk continue to allow others to use his platform to spread hate among our population and foment violence on our streets.